Modern wireless communication networks face an ever increasing demand for high-bandwidth communication services under a wide variety of radio conditions. Various factors may hinder communication over non-ideal radio channels. For instance, frequency-selective fading can attenuate signals transmitted over the frequencies targeted by the fading. This attenuation may result in the information transmitted over the relevant frequencies not being received or being misinterpreted by the intended receiver. For example, information in an encoded message transmitted over the relevant frequencies may become corrupted and the message may be incorrectly decoded at the receiver.
To counter fading and other frequency-selective effects, some communication technologies utilize frequency-diversity transmission schemes when transmitting critical information, such as certain types of control information. Under a typical frequency-diversity scheme, information is transmitted over multiple different frequencies. Frequency-selective effects targeting one of the transmission frequencies may have no impact on the other transmission frequencies. Consequently, frequency diversity schemes may introduce an overall frequency-diversity “gain” in a transmission of information when compared to a transmission of the information over the same channel using only a single frequency. However, the benefits resulting from a particular frequency-diversity scheme will be tied to how well the scheme distributes the informational content of the transmission between the multiple frequencies. If only a small portion of the informational content in the transmission is transmitted over the multiple frequencies, the frequency-diversity gain achieved by the scheme may be minimal.
Many communication technologies require that transmitters apply various forms of channel coding to transmitted information to improve a transmission's resistance to noise and other channel impairments. This channel encoding maps a bit sequence for transmission onto a longer codeword that includes some informational redundancy, thereby increasing the likelihood that the receiver will correctly determine the original bit sequence. While channel coding may increase the chances that a receiver will properly identify the transmitted information, such encoding may asymmetrically redistribute the informational content of the original bit sequence over the codeword. Therefore, a frequency-diversity scheme that indiscriminately assigns sections of the resulting codeword to the various frequencies used by the diversity scheme may produce a sub-optimal frequency-diversity gain. Thus, designing a frequency-diversity transmission scheme suitable for the encoding algorithm to be utilized by a transmitter may provide improved frequency-diversity gains.